Jo Willoughby is a visual artist and educator whose practice focuses on collaboration and cooperation. Dedicated to the service and gratitude of radical collectivity, her work emerges from group praxis, or seeks to consider how and why such forms of togetherness are not only necessary but a joyful resistance in times of neoliberal atomisation. Her most recent research is based on the artist as a member of an activist group, which tools or enquiries might this practice develop alongside other members to sustain meaningful collectivity?
Jo is a member of art collective Stair/Slide/Space based between the UK and the Netherlands. She is also a member of Future Field (a collective based in Rotterdam) and Cultural Workers Unite (A network of precarious, wageless and underpaid cultural workers).
The Soil From My Mother’s Garden, 2020 - Using mud, the glass of the growing space was painted with a poem in English in Dutch written by the artist called 'The soil from my mothers garden'. The mud was collected from the Weilewaal and sites of former gardens.
The Soil From My Mother’s Garden, 2020 - Using mud, the site of the growing space was painted with a poem in English in Dutch written by the artist called 'The soil from my mothers garden'. The mud was collected from the Weilewaal and sites of former gardens.
Love Kept Us Warm, 2019 - Love Kept Us Warm is a constellation of exchanges with an expanded community to consider shifting ideas of boundaries and belonging. Culminating in a series of social gatherings and meals at John Hansard Gallery, the project asks the question: can conversations about the home help us to reimagine the institutional, social and political?
The project is led by Stair/Slide/Space, a collective of artists and curators whose practice is grounded in cooperation, friendship and discussion.
Love Kept Us Warm, Posters, 2019 - Handmade and digitally printed posters from the project Love Kept Us Warm.
Love Kept Us Warm is a constellation of exchanges with an expanded community to consider shifting ideas of boundaries and belonging. Culminating in a series of social gatherings and meals at John Hansard Gallery, the project asks the question: can conversations about the home help us to reimagine the institutional, social and political?
The project is led by Stair/Slide/Space, a collective of artists and curators whose practice is grounded in cooperation, friendship and discussion.
Love Kept Us Warm, 2019 - Love Kept Us Warm is a constellation of exchanges with an expanded community to consider shifting ideas of boundaries and belonging. Culminating in a series of social gatherings and meals at John Hansard Gallery, the project asks the question: can conversations about the home help us to reimagine the institutional, social and political?
The project is led by Stair/Slide/Space, a collective of artists and curators whose practice is grounded in cooperation, friendship and discussion.
The Object Room, GHT: a reincarnation residency, Southampton, 2017 - The Object Room is an invitation to interact, meditate and ruminate with objects found in an archaeological dig on East Street, Southampton. A sound piece plays through headphones "Pick up an object from the table, squeeze it gently, let it indent the surface of your skin and then read it's hieroglyphics..."
The Storytellers, film still (Part of ‘Object Room, GHT:a reincarnation residency, Southampton) 2017 - During a period of time volunteering with Southampton Archaeology society, Jo documented the process of the group cleaning, numbering and classifying finds. As the members of the group handle the archaeological finds, they tell interconnected stories which emerge as webs connecting every day life to fantastical folk tales and historical narratives.
